The writer and non-fiction master Gay Talese used to describe for anyone who asked how he would pin the typed pages of his articles to a wall, in order to step back and re-read the draft with binoculars. That’s right: binoculars! Why did he do this? Because it was the only way he could think of to examine his creation at the sentence level and as a completed whole: simultaneously. To perfect what he made, he needed distance from, and intimacy with. He felt he couldn’t sacrifice one for the other. If he planted a bomb on page 2, he wanted to see exactly how it went off on page 22, and assess whether that was the right story arc.I think one of the most complicated tasks for writers is to find a way to actually read our own work-- not just edit it, or revise it, or write it, but READ it.I don't know about binoculars though. :)How is everyone?I'd love to collect some sentences that need editing/revising. Donations? Post in comments a sentence you'd like to have me edit (or rather, use to spark some thought about sentences!). Can you identify what you think the problem might be, or alternatively, what you'd want to accomplish?Thanks- it's always hard to generate examples!Alicia

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Every day we work with writers to shape their manuscripts for publication. We also evaluate submissions, read our friends’ pages, give second opinions to other editors -- in short, we confront a whole lot of manuscript pages for a whole lot of reasons. But here’s what we don’t do. We don’t -- and we never will -- pull examples directly from any of these manuscripts. The editor-author relationship depends on mutual trust and respect, and we won’t ever compromise that. We might get ideas for blog posts in the course of our interaction with writers and manuscripts, but all examples are ours, with the occasional exception of literary sources.